Benedict XVI went to Africa to deliver the post-synodal exhortation. Two years ago, the special synod for Africa that took place in Rome was very little covered by the media.  But it was «good work» – the pope then said – since it was able to mediate sufficiently between the political and spiritual dimensions. «And for me – the Pope said – this is also a reason for thanks because it makes the post-synodal document easier to draft». The penultimate act of that synod were the 57 final propositions delivered by the assembly of African bishops. The propositions touched on many topics including «greater ecclesial communion at all levels, encouraging cooperation within the Church», as well as an appeal to all those who are at war in Africa: «Stop the hostilities and be reconciled!» Another theme that was frequently discussed was the environment. Observing that there was «an irresponsible degradation and senseless destruction of the earth, which is ‘our mother’» the Synod Fathers noted  that «some businesses, governments and multinational and trans-national companies engage in business that pollute the environment, destroy flora and fauna, thus causing unprecedented erosion and desertification of large areas of arable land… in complicity with those who exercise political and economic leadership in Africa». The bishops also raised their voices on the issues that impact women. They rejected abortion and  so-called reproductive health rights of women, calling instead for the defense of the family and of human life.

All of these topics had been issued by the Pope during his short trip to Benin. «Africa is a continent of hope», Benedict XVI claimed. Hope is the key-word to understand the trip to Benin. As a key-speech was the one held in the Presidential Palace, on November, 19th. After the speech, the Pope moved to Ouidah, 43 kilometres far from the capital of Benin Cotonou from where – at the beginning of the 18th Century – every year 20 thousand slaves taken from all the Western Africa left to the Usa. In Ouidah, Benedict XVI finally deliver the post-synodal exhortation, Africae Munus, African Commitment. The commitment that Benedict XVI delivers to Africa is an important one. From Africa, he warns all the leaders of the world  against political corruption, scandals, instrumentalizing the name of God to justify violence and the individualism that generates despair.

Pope appeals to all political and economic leaders of African countries and the rest of the world to not to manipulate their people and not to deprive their  peoples of hope. «Do not cut them off from their future by mutilating their present! Adopt a courageous ethical approach to your responsibilities and, if you are believers, ask God to grant you wisdom!», the Pope said.

The background of African countries is filled with the Arab Spring and the recent - and Church sponsored – independence of the South Sudan. Neverthless the worries for the future of the Christians after the Arab Spring – especially in Egypt and Libya – the Pope favorably see to the claim of the people. During these last months – he said –  «many peoples have manifested their desire for liberty, their need for material security, and their wish to live in harmony according to their different ethnic groups and religions. Indeed, a new state has been born on your continent. Many conflicts have originated in man’s blindness, in his will to power and in political and economic interests which mock the dignity of people and of nature. Human beings aspire to liberty; then to live in dignity; they want good schools and food for their children, dignified hospitals to take care of the sick; they want to be respected; they demand transparent governance which does not confuse private and public interests; and above all they desire peace and justice».

Benin is an examplar country. Cardinal Bernardin Gantin is considered one of the father of the country – to him is dedicated the airport of Cotonou. And Catholicism had great part in the development of Benin, The former Archbishop of Cotonou, Isidore de Sousa, received special permission from the John Paul II to act as the effective leader of the country in the early 1990s, leading it through a transition from Marxism to democracy. Relationships between the Catholic Church and the State of Benin are wonderful, missionaries and Christian institutions make an appreciated job in the country. The 42,8 per cent of population of Benin is Christian, and the 27,1 per cent of these is Catholic. The rest is made up of faithful of other Confessions, mainly originated by the Lutheran reform. The 24,4 per cent of population is Muslim, and the rest of population belongs to ancient African creeds.

And all the representatives of those religions were sitting in front of Benedict XVI, together with the representatives of government and institution on November, 19th. The Pope contrasts the hope to the paradigm of the expert – who imposes his conclusions and proposes, at the end of the day, few useful solutions – and to the temptation to analyze the realities of Africa like a curious ethnologist or like someone who sees the vast resources only in terms of energy, minerals, agriculture and humanity («reductionist and disrespectful points of view which lead to the unhelpful “objectification” of Africa and her inhabitants»).

Hope is the key to understand two African realities. The first one deals with the sociopolitical and economical situation. The Pope says: «Human beings aspire to liberty; then to live in dignity; they want good schools and food for their children, dignified hospitals to take care of the sick; they want to be respected; they demand transparent governance which does not confuse private and public interests; and above all they desire peace and justice. At this time, there are too many scandals and injustices, too much corruption and greed, too many errors and lies, too much violence which leads to misery and to death ». It is not a ill that affect just Africa: it affects all the world. And people want to understand, they do not want to be manipulated. No policy is absolutely right and no economical policy is neutral. But both policy and economy – the Pope admonishes – has to be done for the common good.

That is why Benedict repeatedly cried out in defense of the poor. During an open-air Mass on sunday in a soccer stadium in Benin’s capital, before some 40,000 wildly enthusiastic, dancing and singing locals, he said «Jesus wanted to identify himself with the poor» and the poor deserve respect because «through them, God shows us the way to Heaven». And in the Africae Munus Benedict called the church to act as a «sentinel», denouncing situations of injustice. The pontiff also took yet another swipe at neo-con ideologies. In his opening speech of the trip, he warned Africans that an «unconditional surrender to the laws of the market and of finance» is among the pathologies of modernity they would do well to avoid.

The second reality deals with the interreligious dialogue. How many wars had been fought in the name of God? «True interreligious dialogue – the Pope said – rejects humanly self-centered truth, because the one and only truth is in God. God is Truth. Hence, no religion, and no culture may justify appeal or recourse to intolerance and violence. Aggression is an outmoded relational form which appeals to superficial and ignoble instincts. To use the revealed word, the Sacred Scriptures or the name of God to justify our interests, our easy and convenient policies or our violence, is a very grave fault».

The challenge for Africa – outlined in the post-synodal exhortation – is to free Africa from his ills. First of all, Aids, to face by providing «everyone with access to treatments and medicines, taking account of uncertain situations! The Church, indeed, has been pleading for a long time for high quality medical treatment to be made available at minimum cost to all concern ». And then, illiteracy that «represents one of the principal obstacles to development. It is a scourge on a par with that of the pandemics. True, it does not kill directly, but it contributes actively to the marginalization of the person – which is a form of social death – and it blocks access to knowledge». More: «Africa’s memory is painfully scarred as a result of fratricidal conflicts between ethnic groups, the slave trade and colonization. Today too, the continent has to cope with rivalries and with new forms of enslavement and colonization». And also the intolerable treatment to which so many children in Africa are subjected: child soldiers, child prisoners, children forced into labour, children ill-treated on account of physical or mental handicap, children said to be witches or warlocks, children said to be serpents, children sold as sex slaves, traumatized children without any future prospects.

Was it a sort of Benedict XVI’s opening to theology of liberation? There is – obviously – some more in depth reason. Leaving Benin, the Pope asked: «Why should an African country not show the rest of the world the path to be taken towards living an authentic fraternity in justice, based on the greatness of the family and of labour? May Africans be able to experience reconciliation in peace and justice!» In a few years, Africa can become the most Catholic continent in the world. The Pope bets on the awakening of Africa, because it is in that awakening that resides the awakening of the Church. The Church that must push for Truth, Reconciliation, Dialogue, Care for Human Being. And Africa – with its Truth and Reconciliation commissions, with its experience of interreligious dialogue because of the cohabitation of several creeds, with his traditional care for human being – can indicate the path to follow to all the world. Africa is a continent of hope. Even for Christianity. Now more than ever.

The Pope concluded: «Their inability to find God is partly the responsibility of believers with a limited or even falsified image of God. So all their struggling and questioning is in part an appeal to believers to purify their faith, so that God, the true God, becomes accessible».

To celebrate the 25th anniversay of the first meeting of Assisi – where he did not go – , Benedict XVI invited once again the delegates of the world religions in the town of the poverello di Assisi. The Pope strongly wanted to commemorate the first meeting in Assisi, but at the same time he did not want that the event would be characterized by religious syncretism.

These worries the Pope explained on March 4, 2011 in a letter to Lutheran pastor Peter Beyerhaus, a longtime friend who had told him about his fears over the new convocation of the day of Assisi. «I understand very well – the Pope wrote – your concern about participating in the encounter of Assisi. But this commemoration would have been celebrated in any case, and, in the end, it seemed to me the best thing to go there personally, in order to try to determine the overall direction. Nonetheless, I will do everything I can to make a syncretistic or relativistic interpretation of the event impossible, and to make it clear that I will always believe and confess what I had called the Church’s attention to with Dominus Iesus».

October, 27 1986. Tv stations all over the world broadcast the images of the event that the pope had so strongly desired: pilgrimage, fasting, prayer, peace among peoples and religions. John Paul II even revived a medieval tradition by invoking on that day a «divine truce». The images of the pope praying with the heads of so many different religions established itself as one of the most powerful signs of his entire pontificate.

But at the same time, critical reservations about the event were taking shape. The event in Assisi added fuel to the fire through some of its more excessive gestures. Some of the city’s churches were allotted for the prayers of Buddhists, Hindus, and African animists, as if these buildings were neutral containers, void of any indelible Christian value. The Buddhists set up a shrine of Buddha on the altar of the local Church of Saint Peter. It did not happen the last 27th of October, when each religion had a personal space to pray and reflect according to its religious thoughts.

The path to Dominus Iesus begins in Assisi and passes through an encyclical, the Redemptoris Missio, released in 1990. Beginning from the affirmation of the Second Vatican Council in the decree Nostra Aetate, according to which «the Catholic Church rejects nothing of what is true and holy in other religions», the period after the council saw the widespread approval of the idea of transforming the missions into a simple commitment to foster the maturation of the «seeds of truth» present in the various religions, as if these seeds were themselves distinct ways of salvation. Redemptoris Missio decisively contrasts this «indifferent mentality, unfortunately widely diffused among Christians as well, which is rooted in incorrect theological views marked by a religious relativism that leads to the conviction that one religion is as good as another» . The encyclical reaffirms the necessity and urgency of proclaiming the Good News of Jesus. This means an explicit proclamation. It means a proclamation made in the certainty that no other religion can save anyone apart from Christ, the only «way, truth, and life».

Dominus Iesus is released during the Holy Year of 2000. The inauguration of the Jubilee refocused some of the critics, since the ceremony of the opening of the holy door was  vaguely interreligious. But the Pope was in no frame of mind for peaceable concessions, as demonstrated by the strong gestures with which he opened the Jubilee year: from the “mea culpa” for the sins of Christians in the past, to the remembrance of the martyrs of yesterday and today, to the solemn reaffirmation of the doctrine according to which «Jesus Christ, and no one else, can give us salvation».

Dominus Iesus  is not presented as an organic treatment of the relationship between the Christian faith and other religions. It limits itself to defining the errors to be corrected and to repeating the essential truth. One of its central passages reads: «The thesis that the revelation of Jesus Christ is of a limited, incomplete, and imperfect character, and must be completed by the revelation present in other religions, is contrary to the faith of the Church….This position radically contradicts the affirmations of faith according to which the full and complete revelation of the salvific mystery of God is given in Jesus Christ».

In Dominus Iesus there many citations from the documents of the Second Vatican Council. But, as soon as it was published, it was met with criticism, both from within and from outside the Church. It was rejected by leaders of other Christian confessions and other religions. There were protests from defenders of secularism, tolerance, ecumenism, and dialogue.

In the mean time, there had been a second meeting among the religious leaders in Assisi, in 1993, during the Balkan war. And then, there had been September 11 and the call for a third meeting, in 2002. But the quest for a new Assisi was shaking the Catholic world long before. Cardinal Ruini had been asked about the problem on December, 10 2001, during the presentation of his last book. “It is an important question – he answered – How to make explicit the consensus to religious freedom presumed as implicit among they who accept to pray together? How to remark the differences between the interreligious prayer of 1986 and the one of today? But it is easier for us to answer that question, since now there is something new in the Western Culture. Something that had been absent and that now is strongly emerging. This novelty is the effort to feel and assert our Christian identity. This novelty has been felt from lay culture as a need not only of the Church, but of all the Western civilization».

Is this novelty still undimished today? «This meeting is less charismatic of the one held 25 years ago, but at the same time we are now saying thing that 25 years ago nobody would tell», one of the “dialogue professionals”  said the last 27th of October. Many things were similar to the event of 1986, beginning from the weather – humid and cold in the morning, seemingly about to rain. But in 1986, a graffiti appeared on the wall of the palace of the Bishop’s curia in the early morning. There is no document to prove it, since mons. Vittorio Peri – the priest that discovered the graffiti – was not so prompt to take a picture of it before letting cancel the graffiti. The priest was mons. Vittorio Peri, now Vicar in Assisi and in 1986 “right hand man” of cardinal Roger Etchegaray, then president of the Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace. The graffiti sentence read: «Wojtyla, not with prayers, but with weapons we defend peace».

The delegates of the World religions speaks before Benedict XVI. Then, the Pope held his speech. He began from the first meeting of Assisi. «At that time – he said – the great threat to world peace came from the division of the earth into two mutually opposed blocs. A conspicuous symbol of this division was the Berlin Wall which traced the border between two worlds right through the heart of the city. In 1989, three years after Assisi, the wall came down, without bloodshed. Suddenly the vast arsenals that stood behind the wall were no longer significant. They had lost their terror. The peoples’ will to freedom was stronger than the arsenals of violence». But – he added – «the world of freedom has proved to be largely directionless, and not a few have misinterpreted freedom as somehow including freedom for violence».

The Pope outlined the new faces of violence. The terrorism, that «is often religiously motivated» – and «in that case religion does not serve peace, but is used as justification for violence». The Pope acknowledged «with great shame» that «yes, it is true, in the course of history, force has also been used in the name of the Christian faith».

Another face of the violence is the one that comes from the absence or negation of God. «The denial of God – the Pope said – has led to much cruelty and to a degree of violence that knows no bounds, which only becomes possible when man no longer recognizes any criterion or any judge above himself, now having only himself to take as a criterion. The horrors of the concentration camps reveal with utter clarity the consequences of God’s absence». Benedict XVI did not only speak about the State-imposed atheism, but he underlined that the «worship of mammon, possessions and power is proving to be a counter-religion, in which it is no longer man who counts but only personal advantage». This is the environment that leads to consider the violence a state of normality. «The absence of God leads to the decline of man and of humanity».

The words of Benedict XVI in Assisi are the perfect sequel of what he said during his last trip to Germany. The program of the Pope is now fair: purify the Faith, make the Church less worldy. And prepare the Church to a new Evangelization – it will be the topic of the next synod of bishops, in 2012 – and to renovate the Faith. The 2012 – it has been officially announced with the release of the motu proprio Porta Fidei – will be the year of Faith. Waiting for the next Papal encyclical. After the first one on Charity and second one on Hope, the next one will be be on  Faith.